Computing systems and networks today are complex and often vast. Some large enterprises may have thousands of individual computing systems interconnected over local and wide area networks. Keeping all these computing systems running smoothly is crucial to the success of an enterprise. For this reason, system developers endeavor to provide useful administrative tools for system administration.
Because the typical system administrator is a very sophisticated user, administrative tools are often more complex than applications intended for the consuming public. For example, command line environments are still popular with system administrators, even though the graphical user interface is preferred by ordinary users. Often, administrators can perform relatively complex tasks quicker using a command line than with a graphical interface.
The typical command line environment is provided by a shell operating on a computing system. Typically, the command line environment provides a few core commands that the administrator can execute. For more complex tasks, typical command line environments allow commands to be “pipelined,” which means that two or more commands can be entered on the same command line, and the results of each command are “piped” or passed to the next command in the pipeline.
Despite their popularity with administrators, there has been little attention paid to making the command line environments more usable and powerful, especially for remote system administration. For instance, frequent is the case when an administrator must perform some action on a remote computer or using information gathered from one or more remote computers. However, even relatively simple tasks prove daunting when remote execution is called for. In addition, the complexities of state of the art computing systems are re-defining what “remote” means. For example, today a “remote” system may be a different process executing on the same computer, yet existing command line environments ignore these situations.
Until now, a command line environment that provides sophisticated remote system administration has eluded those skilled in the art.